What's in a name?

Why do you—why does anyone—sit down to watch a documentary about someone else's life? Because you're interested in that person on a professional level? Because you want to know what makes/made them tick? In the case of someone who died under tragic circumstances, because you want to understand what brought them to that moment? To remember their life? To remember their work?

Directed by Adrian Buitenhuis and Derik Murray, the new documentary I Am Heath Ledger certainly feels like it takes a stab at all of those questions. The talking heads in the movie—and there are some famous friends of Ledger's including Naomi Watts, Ben Mendelsohn, and Djimon Hounsou as well as less famous ones and members of his family—are very happy to discuss how Ledger was always looking for a challenge, always looking for something new and difficult and different from what he'd done before. We are told that he was an artist, both in front of the camera and behind, and that he was a great friend.

Where the film is most interesting, where it excels, is related to this last area. It isn't in the discussion of Ledger, but rather how Ledger affected the people who are giving the interviews in this movie where the documentary itself shines. We get the light Ledger brought into the life of his friends from Australia; we get the way in which he took in Australian actors so they would have a place to live in Los Angeles; we get a touching tale of Ledger's giving Ben Harper a piano and later asking Harper to write a song for Ledger's daughter, and so much more.

These are great stories, great moments, and show the actor to have been a caring human being, but somehow they feel less like a hard look inside Heath Ledger than they do glances at him. I Am Heath Ledger offers a series of reflections of who he was rather than who he actually was. It is who he was filtered through time and memory and loss—perhaps most importantly loss. Of course, certainly this distinction could be said of many documentaries.

Perhaps as an acknowledgment of this, Murray and Buitenhuis provide a lot of personal footage either shot by Ledger or whomever he was with at any given time. We therefore get to see what he looked like when he wasn't being professionally filmed, and there is the sense that we are to understand this as the real Heath Ledger. But is it? And even if it is, those aren't his thoughts and his feelings and who he was inside, just who he was outside (or what he outwardly expressed).

This is a movie about a man who died at 28 from an overdose, and while his need for sleeping pills is mentioned in the film—as is the fact that he was sick prior to his death and reported that the pills didn't always work—that's about as far as it goes. Even if I Am Heath Ledger is a celebration of the life of the man, this portion of his life is significant.

To be sure, the time in the movie spent talking about his death is still powerful, but it's powerful because we hear how his family and friends felt about it. We see the impact of the death on those immediately around him and, at least once, one degree further out than that. But, again, that's not who he was; it is the shadow which Ledger (and his loss) cast upon others rather than the man himself.

The takeaway from I Am Heath Ledger is that he was a nice guy who was also a talented actor. But the stories offered about him don't always feel like they build as much as they should or have a significant payoff. It is a movie heavy on feelings—and it is more than tinged with sadness—but lighter on facts than it might be. One moment the movie is discussing Ledger wanting to direct a feature film based on a book called The Queen's Gambit, and the next he's on to playing the Joker in The Dark Knight. What happened with the adaptation? Was he still planning on making it when he died? The documentary doesn't say; as is its style, it just tells the story and moves on to the next.

The Verdict

I Am Heath Ledger feels like a glancing take on the actor. It takes us through his professional life, and some of his personal one, but it never provides a full picture of him. He had friends and he had family including a child, he was by all accounts a wonderfully nice human being and a talented actor whose best years ought to have been ahead of him. It is touching and emotional and frustrating for not going deeper and offering more.
I Am Heath Ledger airs on Spike on May 17 at 10 pm ET/PT.